Posting Frequency Myth

I’ve seen many many new blogs pop up (including mine) that post daily, or sometime even more than once a day. OK, some of the greatest blogs do that, they are problogs. I made this mistake, posting daily when you have the time is good, but in the end, when time is short and users see you posting less often, they are more likely to quit reading than if you keep to a regular(ish) posting schedule. There are other problems with posting on a regular basis, one of these is content or lack of.

Posting all the time draws in quick-readers, people looking to read, move on, read, not permanent reader who will consider subscribing to your feed. The longer-lasting reader won’t stay because they know that posting daily will result in a lack of content in a few days/weeks. This is simply because daily posting is something only the big blogs can afford/desire to achieve well. News blogs always have the chance to add new content, but again, no casual blogger can write well for a news blog, because the news is already past on the internet an hour after it’s posted. The average blogger cannot and should not keep up, because it’s just not the nature of a casual blog.

So, a casual blogger must have some other way of achieving readers? I believe that leads to the high-quality, interesting, unique, niche and analytical blog posts. Short posts are fine, just make sure the content is unique or just awesome enough to resurface with out people saying: “oh I remember that one from ages ago”; that makes bloggers look like complete fools, especially when they claim it’s something new and wow. Concentration on the powerful post is the way to go, there’s hundreds of useful tutorials on the web about how to do well in posting, do some research, post about something you’re interested in, and you’re away!

How to start blogging?

I though’t I’d kick off this blog with the simple post about how to start blogging. It’s been covered many many times, but I’m going to cover it again, because there’s no harm in doing so.

When starting blogging, only a few things have to be done. The very first and most important is whether to use a free blogging service, like wordpress.com, blogger or livejournal. The other option is to pay for web hosting, but access the customization and direct control no free service offers. The simplest way to choose is: if you know xHTML/CSS (stuff that makes web pages), and want to implement your own design, go for the paid, self-hosted option. If you just want to be blogging right now, with a theme someone else made, choose a free service. Obviously people may want different opinions, personally I self-host all my projects/blogs with the exception of this one, because I’m a web developer/designer and know my way around how it all works.

If you’ve chosen a free service, simple, this tutorial is over, register on the site and get blogging, thats it! If you choose the self-hosted option, you’ve got a lot of choices to make…

The most important choice in my opinion, the choice you want to get right first time, is what blogging script/system are you going to use? You’ve also got to choose a web host to place your blog script/system. Choosing a system may be more important, but choosing a host comes first, because you need a host thats reliable, got good reviews, good support and PHP/mySQL support. If all thats confusing, perhaps a free service is the best option, because running a shared account with no knowledge is hard. If you start free and progress, it gets a whole lot easier. Below I’m going to go through choosing a host, I’ll recommend some too, and I’ll go through setting up your blog!

OK, choosing a host. This is where things can get a little confusing. You’ve got bandwidth, disk space, mySQL databases, php versions, control panel systems, support & uptime guarantees and probably more. For honest reviews on hosts or any help with choosing a host, I highly recommend the web hosting forums. I’ve been through many different hosts during my time on the web, some good, some terrible. I rarely recommend hosts, because I’m extremely fussy about hosting, but current hosts I would 100% recommend to anyone would have to be Super Bytes (their site currently seems to be down for a redesign), A Small Orange and Innohosting. When choosing a host, you really have to go out and find one yourself, it’s tough, but a good choice with a host can make a huge difference and save many painful hours of backing-up & changing hosts which might happen if you choose a bad host. If you want more help with choosing a host, I can help you, comment and I’ll do my best

Finally, time to set up the blog. More choices. WordPress (my personal favorite), Textpattern, Movable Type, Nucleus just to name a few blogging systems. Once again, research is the key to success. The blogging systems all offer a wide range of features/control panels. WordPress is probably the most popular of these, with the biggest community. Closely followed by Textpattern. Movable Type is different because they offer free and paid versions of the script. I’ve only used the nucleus demo on their site, but the interface was a bit confusing (bear in mind this was a while back). Movable Type sucks in my opinion because whenever you change anything, the entire site has to be “rebuilt”, because it’s static in reality. This annoys me to much, so I gave up on it. Having said that, you can manage multiple blogs from one admin interface with Movable Type.

This effectively leaves two rivals: WordPress and Textpattern. There are hundreds of arguements on the internet as to which is better, but it seems the ultimate conclusion is that WordPress is more blogger-focused, while Textpattern is more overal-site focused. I still used WordPress over Textpattern because the templating system is much much simpler in WordPress. Once again, it’s all about personal preference I’m afraid. Install both, test them, push them to the limit, and base your decision upon that.

As for installing these blogging systems, it’s pretty simple, if you have it with your host, you can get fantastico to auto-install it, otherwise it’s easy, they all have extensive instruction manuals and great community support.

I believe thats it when starting blogging. With a blog setup, you’re ready to start posting and start generating some traffic, which is the next step. I hope this tutorial is useful and good luck blogging

So… the casual blogger eh?

ProBlogger, Blogging Pro, Pro Blog Design. All blogs about blogging. Pro Blogging.

But something’s missing, the casual blogger, the blogger that doesn’t want  to live off their blog, have 1billion subscribers and sell every ad spot at $10,000/month. The casual blogger doesn’t seem to get a look-in from what I can see.

Thats what I’m here to fix. This blog is going to be my blogging journey as well as other peoples. Starting with getting into blogging, blogging tools, the options, then moving onto content. But it’s all aimed for the casual blogger, the blogger who has a job, who lives life fine, and just needs a place to vent: a blog.